This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

After being named the winner of the $25,000 Charles Taylor prize yesterday at a luncheon at the Windsor Arms Holtel, Rudy Wiebe confessed to having an unfair advantage: he had worn his lucky shoes.

"I bought them in 1974 to wear to Rideau Hall to receive the Governor General's fiction award for The Temptations of Big Bear," said Wiebe, who flew in from Edmonton. (For the record, his shoes were black with a pebbly finish.)

Wiebe won for his memoir Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest, published last year by Knopf Canada. It is the story of the first 12 years of his life in Speedwell, Sask., where his hardworking Mennonite parents, whom he calls Pah and Mam, came to homestead in 1933, fleeing persecution in Stalin's Russia.

In his acceptance speech, he paid tribute to his older sister Helen (dead at 17), who read him poetry and taught him to speak English, and to his mother, who he said would have asked in her Low German dialect, "We are ordinary people. What do you want with such a book? Who would read it?"

Wiebe was chosen by the three-person jury – historian Margaret MacMillan, retired senator Laurier LaPierre, and former publisher Jan Walters – over short-listed Canadian authors John English, author of Citizen of the World, the first of his two-volume biography of Pierre Elliott Trudeau; and Ross King, author of The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism. All three authors presented their books on Sunday to a packed audience at the Meridien King Edward Hotel on King St.

"These days, all the childhood memoirs published are about child abuse," Wiebe mused after the ceremony hosted by Noreen Taylor. She founded the prize in memory of her late husband, the writer Charles Taylor. The first winner had been Wayne Johnston in 2000, for Baltimore's Mansion.

"I had a lovely childhood," Wiebe said.

"My parents worked and had deep faith and were good to me. They were thankful to God to the last days of their lives that Canada had accepted them and they could raise their family here."

Ninety-eight books were submitted this year, more than twice the number the judges received in the early years.

Walters said that while all the books were expertly written and had "large ambitions," Of This Earth also had emotional appeal. "Margaret said that Rudy's book is the one that haunts you, the one that stays with you and Laurier and I felt the same way. We knew we had a winner," said Walters.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com